


immer wieder

by geode



Series: RIP the WIPs [2]
Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Hogwarts, Angst, Character Study, Christmas, Drabble Collection, Ficlet Collection, Fix-It, Fluff, Kid Fic, M/M, Pre-Slash, Stream of Consciousness, Undercover, Walk Into A Bar
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-09-11
Updated: 2018-06-06
Packaged: 2018-08-14 11:48:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 4,507
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8012509
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/geode/pseuds/geode
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>My Newt/Hermann ficlet collection! {see series for more info}</p><p>01 meeting at a bar - 02 hogwarts au - 03 loners in highschool - 04 kiddo meetcute - 05 witness protection - 06 christmas in the lab - 07 newt angst - 08 hermann angst/consciousness - 09 fixit of newt's life</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. out of phase

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Newt works nights, Hermann works at the University, and their paths cross for like twenty minutes every day.

The best thing about working nights is, undoubtedly, all the weirdos. Some people are just _so fucking weird_. And the best thing about the best thing was that half the time it wasn’t even that strange – like a dude could rock up at 4am in a rugby mascot costume and Newt would just node sagely and hand him a G &T, or a lady in a ball gown who couldn’t remember her name would nap in a corner booth while he cleaned tables, or he’d have a really good conversation with that one old man who always started telling you about aliens if you so much as acknowledged his presence. These things have all happened in Newt’s actual life, and he loves it. He gets to be the patter of backs to all the nutjobs on this side of the city, console them, encourage them, call them cabs and direct them to delightfully obscure internet forums where their kinks are never shamed.

He likes to invent shit about people’s lives when they walk in, try to guess their poison before they order it and all that. It’s nearing the end of his shift now – nearly morning – so there are only a couple of folks around: a retired pirate with a soft spot for elaborate cocktails sitting by the darkened window, and a lawyer called Jason who apparently just finished a case forty minutes ago and needed to halt the zombifying process before it was too late. Newt had taken pity on this one, and had gone in the back to make him some emergency toast.

The door tinkles softly as he’s squatting under the bar trying to find a tea towel that had fallen down the side of one of the kegs. He keeps trying to reach it for a few more futile seconds, but damn his short arms, it would have to be marked as a lost cause until Tendo arrived.

He stands up and blinks at the man before him. At first glance, there is nothing wrong with him, which is odd in itself. Normal is the new weird, and all that. On second glance, there is still nothing wrong with him. Newt can’t help be disappointed in his inability to immediately fit the guy into an archetype.

“Morning,” he says instead on auto. “What can I get you?”

_Whiskey. He could totally be a whiskey guy._

“A lemonade please, with ice.” the man nods formally in greeting, seeming distracted, or maybe just out of it: most people would be at – Newt checks his watch – five thirty-three on a Wednesday morning. His eyes slide up to the brass decorations overhead and the postcards lining the walls.

“Comin’ up,” Newt says. He would probably have had to advise him otherwise if he had actually ordered anything alcoholic. It’s still dark, so counts as night, but some people start waking up around this time, so it’s probably best to start curing hangovers rather than creating them at this point. “Is that a German accent I hear?” he muses, tossing a glass in his hand for the mere reason of showing off his hand-eye coordination.

The man’s eyes flick back to him. “Perhaps.” he concedes. It’s so low-key aggressive Newt laughs involuntarily, and the guy’s eyes narrow defensively.

“No, no, _mich auf_ , sorry. Just so unusual to meet another of my kind, haha,” he babbles. He honest to God says “haha”, like in separate syllables. How do attractive people do that to him? It’s like a superpower that can reduce pansexual enemies to a heap of goo.

The guy relaxes minutely.

“I’m Newt,” Newt says, pushing the lemonade glass over the counter and holding out his hand. He has a good memory for names (and faces, and everything else, really), so he takes it as his personal duty to make every patron a regular, starting with an introduction.

The guy assesses the situation, and then slips his satchel off his shoulder and sets it on the stool next to him. In the split-second before he speaks, Newt’s brain goes ping! and he thinks, _of course: satchel, tie, haircut. Eccentric professor._ “Hermann,” the man replies, shaking Newt’s hand.


	2. boys out of dorms

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A Slytherin and a Ravenclaw climb onto a roof, diametrically opposed foes.

'You know,' Newt takes a drag of his cigarette, smiling a little at the thought of how ironically sophisticated his silhouette must look from the grounds, with the moon as a backdrop. 'I was really pissed they didn't put me in Ravenclaw.'

Hermann raises an eyebrow and reaches across to snag the cigarette with his long fingers. The moonlight casts odd shadows on his angular face, and it's interesting, and Newt likes interesting things, so he looks.

'You don't have the attention span.' Hermann says, giving no indication as to whether a short or a long one was the preferred.

'I didn't know attention span was the winning factor,' Newt returns lazily. The time of night and the alcohol in his veins had turned what would've been a full blown argument into simple back-and-forth. It was rather pleasant, in a _taking a breather before the next round way_.

'It isn't.' Hermann replies just as easily, tapping the cigarette nonchalantly on the edge of a roof tile. In the dark, Newt grins wider, wondering if he makes this shit up as he goes, the taking what people say and twisting it to his advantage so it seems he always has the upper hand. It's irritating as fuck, and Newt's jealous. 'I'm merely pointing out one of the countless reasons for your not being… Eagular.'

Newt snorts. 'Wait, countless?' he challenges, leaning back on his other elbow so that he's stargazing. 'You're pretty good at math. Try.'

Hermann makes a noise of annoyance, something Newt will undoubtedly never hear again, and thus savours on his tongue, filing it away for a rainy day. Hermann doesn’t rise to the bait, and Newt smiles into the darkness with the total confidence of one who’s pleasure in that moment can’t be seen.


	3. Room 127

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *muffled fall out boy* Let's be alone together!

The bell rings, and Newt finally releases the wire spine of his notebook, feeling the indents on the pads of his fingers slowly recede. He keeps his eyes on the teacher, half to feign concentration and half to check she’s not paying any attention to him, and starts slotting his pens into their plastic case.

“Well,” Ms Ayer says, sighing at whatever point she was making being cut short. “Homework’s the same as usual - next chapter of the textbook, please. Come see me if you don’t get it, don’t just not do it. Looking at you, Ryan.”

The class titters amid the mad scramble to gather pens and exercise books and be the first one out the door; Newt had planned ahead and is halfway across the room before anyone had stood up yet. Trying to not look too ecstatic, he grabs his coat and—

“Newt, hang on,” Ms A calls out.

“ _No,_ ” he mewls, deflating. _So goddamn close_. He turns around dejectedly as the rest of the class files out messily behind him. “All okay, Miss?”

She smiles at him reassuringly. “Don’t worry, you’re not in trouble. I just thought I’d let you know that the test next Monday is going to be your tier assessment.”

Ah. Newt feels his face heat up. “I’m really sorry my dad keeps ringing up, I don’t know what’s gotten into him,” he babbles. “I told him to stop, I don’t mind, not really, it’s—”

She starts laughing at him, swatting his arm with the stack of worksheets she’d been collecting. “It’s okay, I don’t mind,” she winks. “It’s exactly what he should be doing, anyway. Bloody ridiculous having you in third set.”

“Ha,” Newt says awkwardly. “Um.”

“So yes, study hard this week and hopefully we’ll never have to see each other ever again,” she says. “Now shoo, I have some Year Sevens coming over here that you’d best avoid like the plague.”

Oh right, shit; in his embarrassment, he’d momentarily forgotten he needed to be somewhere else, like, _now_. “Alrighty, bye, Ms A!” he yells back through the doorway, his body having starting propelling itself away without his knowledge. He’ll miss her. For all that it’s been hell, he’ll miss her.

It’s been at least two minutes now, which may not sound like long but to the average energy-drink fuelled teen that meant any window of opportunity was long gone. Newt sighs and heads off anyway, not having anything better to do for the next forty minutes. Theoretically, there shouldn’t be anyone in 127, because (a) why would there be, and (b) there had never been anyone in there before, and Newt would (and does) know.

However, “theory” is a nice way of saying “bullshit”, and nothing in Newt’s life ever goes to plan.

“Uh,” he says at the guy, the guy who is sitting in Newt’s favourite seat, the guy who looks just as put out as Newt feels, the guy who— oh wait, is full-on glaring now.

And hang on, this has been Newt’s hideout all term: no one has any right to kick him out of his own… uh, state-owned classroom, much less a dude with _a fucking bowl cut _.__

__Newt shakes off any apprehension he may have had and saunters properly into the room. The boy watches him with narrowed eyes, but as predicted, seems to realise he can’t actually bar his entry. Newt chooses a seat by the window next to the less exciting bookshelf, but still a bookshelf, and a moment later – almost as a testament of his triumph – the sun comes out and he settles down to bask in it smugly._ _

__Bowl Cut rolls his eyes, and is about to return to his reading material when he catches sight of the sandwich Newt is unwrapping. Their eyes meet for a long second as he realises._ _

__“What?” Newt accuses before he can be offered something awful like pity._ _

__The guy blinks at him. “Nothing,” he says at last in a thick accent, and then he reaches down beside him, presumably into his bag, and takes out a foil-wrapped package of his own._ _

__It’s a weird, pathetic and kind of lovely bonding moment. “You too, huh,” Newt says._ _


	4. the nerd cage

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A 12 year old Newt has a crush, feat. pigeons.

Newt falls in love on a Sunday, in a park in London. He's standing on the left pedal of his bike and cruising along, aware both that the punishment for cycling on the footpath is a £50 fine, and that it would take two thirds of a second to switch his feet around to seem like he'd been walking, if a park-keeper should suddenly appear. He sees the object of his love - although at this stage he didn't know it - sitting on a bench about twenty metres ahead, being attacked by pigeons.

"Oh my _god!_ " he squawks, half ecstatic and half appalled, angling his bike towards the fiasco and then throwing it down to disperse the pigeons. "Go away, you stupid things!" he yells, flapping around in the middle of the throng to hurry their parting flight. The boy on the bench stares at him like he's mad.

(Wait for it...)

"God, I hate birds," Newt says, huffing his fringe out of his eyes. "Well, that's a lie, I love birds. But those ones were annoyi- whatever, are you okay?"

"Fine, thank you," was the terse reply. The boy sniffed, brushing invisible pigeon refuse off his trousers.

(Wait for it...)

He can't have been much older than Newt, maybe twelve. He had a fascinatingly horrible haircut and was wearing a tie for some reason. These were the things that immediately stood out.

"Why were they all over you, anyway? Were you _feeding_ them? Oh boy."

"No! Of course I wasn't. I'm not an idiot."

"Sure, okay, I wasn't... implying anything."

"If anything, your performance just then proves that _you_ are the idiot here."

"Wow, I just saved you from a dumb death by pigeon attack and this is what I get? Bitching?"

The boy sniffs again, kicks his feet a little in the gravel. "I'm sorry. I... it was good of you, to come over."

"More like it. You're welcome." Newt picks up his bike, cursing under his breath when he sees his spontaneous heroism ended in scratches to the metalwork.

"I didn't mean to be rude."

"Dude, it's alright. Being dive bombed would shock anyone, don’t sweat."

"Would've pleased Tesla," the kid grumbles, like he's angry at himself.

(Aaaaand there we go.)

Newt turns and stares at him. “Tesla,” he repeats, dumbfounded.

“Yes, Tesla.” The boy retorts, rubbing his knuckles across his leg. He snaps his head up a second later to glare at Newt. “ _What._ ”

Newt blinks. “Dude,” he says eventually. “ _Dude_.” 


	5. in the deep shade

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "You have to disappear" is functionally the same as "You have to die", really, and that's the last thing Newt's wanted to do for years now.

The train rattled too much to fall asleep against the window. Some of the passengers were valiantly trying, having exhausted all their forms of entertainment; it was getting on for hour eight and batteries were dead, books finished, books reread. Others were keeping a wary eye on the luggage racks, waiting for the inevitable jolt that would bring all the bags showering down. A woman in a knitted scarf sighed, stretching her legs out in front of her. A couple untangled their hands, the girl shuffling to lean her head onto the guy's shoulder. Two men sitting opposite each other look apathetically in different directions, one looking where they'd come from, the other where they were going. One wore a wristwatch with the wrong time set on it. He was called David. Yesterday he hadn't been.


	6. jingle bells, silence tells

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Christmas fic with little to no Christmas involved.

Newt isn't a loner.

It's Christmas Eve and he's working and it's not because he has to but he isn't a loner.

" _And if it isssss Merry Christmas, all this shit's got to be done,_ " Newt mutters to himself, reaching behind his ear for a pencil and knocking his glasses askew in the process; sighs; " _Looook to the future now, something something somethiiiiiiing's fuuuun._ "

"Incorrect on several levels." Hermann contributes, not looking up from where his fingers are flying over his keyboard across the desk.

"Uh huh, and what are they?" Newt replies. He leans back in his creaking office chair and looks up, welcoming distraction.

"Inter-K isn't due until February, for one." Hermann points out. His eyes flicker to meet Newt's, faintly smug, as ever.

"I might not be-"

"Let me rephrase: none of your reports are due until January seventh at the earliest, and you're too uninterested in what you're doing for it to be the Maxwell notes."

"It's creepy how you know stuff, man," Newt says lazily, stretching behind his head. _Aquamarine_ comes to mind and he hastily folds his arms across his chest.

"Secondly," Hermann continues, and Newt concludes that Tendo must have ambushed him with mulled wine at some point because he's never this talkative, "you certainly do know the rest of the words."

"Ooh, get you! Fancy a sing along then? Mariah Carey, a bit of Bublée..."

"I will castrate you." he says calmly, and Newt chokes on air.

"Um," he manages. "Um, and third?"

"Third?"

"'Several' implies more than two, dude,"

Hermann looks up again, cocks his head and narrows his eyes. "Hm. Third, the fact that you're singing at all-"

"- _Humming_ -"

"Singing, and thus in the spirit, juxtaposes why you're here and not embarrassing yourself in a bar or a club, or anywhere that has alcohol, really."

Newt blinks dumbly. "They... have wine here, downstairs," he says pathetically after a beat. Hermann just slides his glasses up his nose and raises an eyebrow. "Okay, okay, you're right, it's wrong. It's, as you so nicely put it, _incorrect_ that I'm here on the most festive night of the year. So what, though; you're here."

It sounds wrong as soon as he says it. He'd meant _'Pot, let me introduce Kettle'_ , he'd meant it to be a comfortably visceral insult, but the line is thin between loathing and - well. And it's been hard to see the line at all lately, 'cause neither of them thinks about any of it anymore: so it had spectacularly come out like a sentiment, a confession. Like a, 'here with _me_ '.

Newt swallows, thoughts tripping over his tongue and not getting anywhere, and he's expecting something to be thrown at him (when is he not?), so it's really very shocking when all Hermann does it flush this ridiculous pink colour.

They stare at each other. Newt coughs.

"I, er, you can't have, um, anywhere better to be either," he eventually says, voice doing a weird thing with octaves and his tone failing miserably at insistence. He resolutely ignores this. Blame it on the hour.

"No." Hermann replies shortly, shaking his head once, as if to dislodge a bug. He returns to his keyboard, typing fractionally more erratically than before.

Newt blinks at him for a few moments, confused as to what just happened.

"Hermann," he tries, but Hermann doesn't look up this time. "I'm... did people cancel on you or something? I didn't mean to suggest... I mean I... You're not bad company for Christmas Eve, if that's what you... Oh god, um, not that you're..."

“Shut up, Newton,” Hermann replies shortly. He flexes his long fingers over the keys for a second, and when he resumes typing the pace is back to even and impossibly quick. Newt huffs out a breath in something like relief, because this is familiar ground. He can deal with this, or more accurately not deal with it.

He watches Hermann’s hands for a moment longer, thinks about Estella in that one scene his English teacher tore apart, and then swallows it all down and turns back to his own work.

He doesn’t leave until Hermann does, playing _Saboteur_ online in the weak light of dawn until the other man finally shuffles the papers on his desk and stands up, swaying a little on his feet but adamantly trying to appear stable.

Newt claps him on the back on the way out of the lab. “Happy Christmas, dude,” he says. “Here’s to experiencing it as little as possible. See you at dinner.”

Hermann stares at him dumbly for a second, because sleep-deprivation, and then when he replies, “See you at dinner,” it sounds like toeing the line again, like acknowledging something.


	7. 1, 2, 3, 4, you are who i most adore

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Newt feels too full sometimes.
> 
> a/n classique newt angst!

1.

newt feels too full sometimes, like he’s spilling over, like its crippling him; making him fall onto the dusty racetrack like the shot (readysetgo) severed a tendon, severed a chance. he feels like he should’ve told someone when he was little and the world always felt one marble-roll away from tipping over

2.

he could read at six months old, and everyone said he was a miracle.

3.

he doesn’t really believe he'll see sixty because even without the end of the world he was never gonna be able to put this off, procrastinate his demise, his abyss tied to his ankles, following him like a smiling moon on a string, waiting for him to finally close his eyes.

4.

generally it's okay, but there are only four emotions when its not: anger (for himself, for, for), sadness (for the rest of them, no no, not like that; like they wish they could know and you wish they weren’t curious), infatuation (it's scary, man, this crazed stumbling, this cursing and grinning, the blood in their eyes) and sanity (worst.) (sanity strikes in the quiet hours) (everyone’s their own worst enemy.) (but no one has an enemy quite so capable of destruction.)

+

he sits alone and reads articles he didn’t write. corrects them with a red biro.


	8. barcodes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> You resist because that's what you do.
> 
> a/n i guess you'd call these streams of consciousness? i just really liked this, i should do more

4

 

desperate eyes, frantic pulse, crazed shouts in the semi-darkness, _it's gotta be point three, it's gotta be_ , and no one knows what they're doing except you, but you don't speak because if you do the world will end, and if you don't the worst that could happen would be shanghai sinking into the ocean, so you bite your lip and try not to cry, ignoring the hand on your arm like looking over would kill you, which it just might these days; and your mind is screaming the keycode to hell's gates and it's becoming hard to hear the reality around the number being carved onto the inside of your skull, but you resist because that's what you do, you reel yourself in and sit curled up in the back of your mind at the back of the room and fight it.

 

3

 

you're unstoppable, barreling through rubble and bodies, syringes raised like swords - anchoring lives to the drained seabed, stitchin' 'em back into the skin of the planet with the fury of a thousand dead under your belt - right up until a demon or a devil or a lost princess from a kingdom the other side of the forbidden hill splits the atmosphere in front of your eyes, the air shuddering like ragged nails over velvet, and abruptly you're civilians again. you glance at him, the lone wolf's companion, lowering your weapon of mass-survival enough that your arms cease their screaming, and his mouth is open like God's shoved all his worst nightmares down his throat, and the manic grin from a second ago, from another quieter life, is fading so quickly it's hard to remember it was ever there. the monster - the only soldier here, let's be honest - roars its strangled ballad and pounces, the cat in the alley. you grab his shirt, pull him into the shattered glass with you, shade your eyes, everyone but him and you and you and him forgotten in the mists of the gas choking the city. he's okay - he's yelling, spitting blood, swearing at you - but he's okay, he's still here, life in shaking hand. you crawl away from the fires, knee cracking, struck by the imminent lightening you knew would always befall you; move forward, go, _get out, dude_. you lose track of the pieces of reality flying past your skull, scratching their ownership onto your skin. life becomes hazy, dream-like, slo-mo soft-focus, and you can almost hear Bach in the chaos as your leg (you're fairly sure it's yours, anyway) scrapes along the gravel of the past three years and you hear him say _shit, Hermann_ and you wonder... but not for long. the door frame you dragged yourselves through is splintering, and you'd kick it apart if you could, if the world deemed it fair to let you, so that the wood and paint flakes obscured your shrunken bloodied bodies, already covered in bits of the ceiling, from the princess, from the universe you once thought was easily navigated, for you, anyway: it _favoured_ you...

 

2

 

stumble into arms but legs won't last long, we gotta run, _we have to run_

 

1

 

the way the quiet falls like snow makes you remember how long it's been. hush. hush now. a city has never been this quiet.

 


	9. finally, yes, at last, phew.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The world doesn't end, and more importantly Newt is okay.

An integral part of Newt's story is the sadness, but it's not a part of him; he's more than 3am and little orange plastic bottles.

When he's six, he has the best year of his life - everyone's in awe of him, and his parents are in love with him, and everything he does amazes himself, breaks records and leaves the universe scrambling to keep up. He's flying, he can do anything. His mom calls him Baby and Honey; his dad calls him Genius; all the kids at school want to hang out with him, and he's in such a position as to cancel on them on Friday afternoons so he can unpick the latest PC he'd sent off for.

When he's nine he graduates school and the day is glorious, sun and sky, photos in the paper the next morning that capture exactly how his glasses kept slipping down his nose in the heat.

His tenth birthday they go to Berlin and do the sights, meeting a family friend who gets them tickets to an exclusive Silver Screen performance; Newt eats too much popcorn and doesn't get to sleep till the early hours. On the plane home he listens to The Doors with his dad snoozing into the top of his hair.

He's top of whatever leaderboard he's put on, and gets his first boyfriend too, meeting him at karate class on Wednesdays. They get ice cream mainly, movies sometimes. He's homeschooled for a while, and wakes up at 11 to do calculations over toasted bagels.

When he's fifteen he goes into college properly for the first time, and starts his masters. It's exciting as anything to live away from home (he spends at least a grand on home ware, and it's the most fun he's ever had).

He writes papers and then a book and then snowballs into another degree and another boyfriend, and at 19 he buys a house on the East coast. Birds chirping outside his window in the mornings becomes a highlight as he becomes his parents, inevitably - but it isn't bad at all because his parents are pretty cool, he thinks.

He's offered a job as a professor. Two months later he wins an award for it. Academic and spiritual success lines up and Newt feels no need to tell _fuck you!_ to the stars like he used to, has no need for that anger-fueled motivation now. He keeps seeing his therapist, because they're friends, and because the balance is just so and he knows this.

Newt's breakup that December turns into the most fantastic month imaginable: he meets Hermann in a bar he's being sad in, orders him another whiskey and walks him home. They do dinner and gallery openings and operas (boring, but Hermann loves that shit) and Newt makes an effort to learn how to cook.

Eventually affection and company become a given.

Hermann wins the Nobel prize and Newt is ecstatic. They go on holiday to Stockholm and get married in secret in a white chapel with an ugly mauve carpet end to end and hardly even regret it when they get back.

Of course, sometimes he misses the edginess. The rain. The Arctic Monkeys. But he doesn't _need_ them anymore, so when Hermann walks out on him he doesn't punch the wall or dig out his notebook to write about it; he inhales, exhales, inhale, exhales, and walks after him.

He used to think this kind of thing was just for other people, boring people, the kind of people who didn't have to deal with his brain and his heart. He used to think that if he ever caught himself doing it he'd have lost some part of himself, because for so long the demon on his shoulder has been trying to tell him that was the only part of him that was real, the sad.

And then he grew up, and changed his mind like all good scientists should be able to do, and realised happiness didn't have to be out of character; there was nothing alien about smiling and taking mugs of tea to the end of the garden in order to watch the sun rise, with your kingdom lighting up, slowly, behind you, as it stirs.


End file.
